


Drawn to the Blood

by Cowboy_Sneep_Dip



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Zombie Apocalypse, but like Risen, but with a fun and sexy twist ;)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-29 01:47:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19820011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cowboy_Sneep_Dip/pseuds/Cowboy_Sneep_Dip
Summary: Lucina walks forward, cautiously, holding her breath. “Hey, dude, are you okay? It’s dangerous to be out here alone.”The man under the streetlight is still, his huddled form silhouetted in black against the cone of yellow. Gnats flit in the light, illuminated. Or maybe flies. The man’s hands are curled into fists, trembling little balls of shadow.Lucina's heart thrums in her chest, louder than the buzzing of flies.





	Drawn to the Blood

**Author's Note:**

> This was a commission! It was also so much dang fun to work on, and there will definitely be more in the future! Hope you enjoy!

The sky is dark overhead, moonless, shadow-lit shifting forms of clouds over the blanket of twilight above. A car rumbles slowly along a narrow forest road, exhaust chugging from its rear. It’s an old car, a second-hand Camaro with faded blackish-blue paint and a ding across the driver’s side door. The car downshifts and pulls off the forest road onto a narrower trail, a single lane of gravel bordered on both sides by trees bathed in shadow. A hand-cranked window rolls down, letting the warmth of late-summer night roll through the car, a blanket-breeze of sweat and leaves and the soft buzz of insects.

“God dammit, Lucina, I told you we should have asked for directions.”

Lucina leans back against the leather driver’s seat, one hand draped loosely over the steering wheel. “Listen, do you have your license? No? I know what I’m doing. It's around here somewhere.”

Severa scoffs and leans out the window, sticking her face into the warm breeze. The damn AC didn’t work, and in the summer the Camaro was a toaster oven. “Fine.” 

Lucina shifts again, the wheels spinning out against gravel, and the car rumbles along the darkness. Music flits from the radio, some old folksy thing that Severa pretends to hate when Lucina’s picking stations. The forest is quiet, save the crunch of gravel under tires.

They follow the road for some time, Severa staring at the shifting shadows between the trees, until they reach a junction in the road. To one side, a small clearing with a squat wooden shack with broken windows and a single streetlight casting a beam of light down on the intersection. 

Lucina frowns. 

A man stands under the streetlight, facing the pole. 

Lucina slows the car to a crawl. 

“What the fuck?” Severa frowns, leaning back in her seat. “This guy’s gonna get hit, standing in the middle of the road like that.” 

“Yeah…” Lucina says cautiously, rolling almost to a stop. She moves her hand to lay on the horn and stops herself. She rolls down her window. 

“Hey, dude! You good?”

The figure hunched under the streetlight doesn’t move.

“Jackass,” Severa mutters under her breath. 

“Maybe.” Lucina shifts the car into park and unbuckles.

“Hey, Luce...hey, what are you-” Severa’s protest is cut off by the driver’s side door slamming. 

Lucina walks forward, cautiously, holding her breath. “Hey, dude, are you okay? It’s dangerous to be out here alone.” 

The man under the streetlight is still, his huddled form silhouetted in black against the cone of yellow. Gnats flit in the light, illuminated. Or maybe flies.

“Hey, man,” Lucina says, almost reaching him. She stops.

The man’s hands are curled into fists, trembling little balls of shadow. Lucina licks her lips. 

“Uh, we’re just…” Lucina holds her breath. “We’re just gonna go past you, okay?” Her heart thrums in her chest, louder than the buzzing of flies. “Yeah.” 

-

Lucina leans back in her deck chair. “I don’t think I lifted my foot from the pedal until we were back on campus.”

“Yeesh, that’s creepy,” Kjelle laments over a half-empty beer can. “You guys okay?”

“Mmhm” Severa says, draped perpendicular over Lucina’s lap. She snatches a drink from Lucina’s hand and speaks into it between sips. “It was probably nothing, but you know how those back roads can be.” 

“I think Yarne would have just up and died,” comes another voice. 

“Oh, hey, Laurent, can you grab the six-pack on the counter before you come out? Thanks.” Lucina wriggles underneath Severa’s weight, trying to stretch her legs. They’re in her backyard, now, in a bright cone of safe light, the orange glow of a firepit encircled by deck chairs and crumpled beer cans.

It’s a small, quiet place just off campus, one amongst a handful of rowhomes bordered by narrow weed-choked sidewalks and scraggly trees. Lucina’s backyard is encircled by a rickety wooden fence, upon which has been painted any number of terrible things - carved hearts and initials, stupid slogans, a stenciled  _ GO DRAGONS _ , and a surprising dearth of genitalia. Lucina snatches her beer back from Severa.

Kjelle pokes the firepit with a stick, watching the embers shift and glow orange, watching the crumbling of white ash from blackened coal. “I’m glad you guys made it back. I would have been kickin’ myself if you had gotten hurt coming back from one of my games.”

“Eh,” Severa shrugs, snatching a drink as Laurent walks by with a six-pack and sits heavily in his own deck chair. “It’s just because  _ someone  _ thought we should take a shortcut.” 

“It’s a good shortcut!” Lucina protests. “Er, in the daytime. Usually.” 

Severa furrows her brow expectantly.

“OKAY IT LOOKS DIFFERENT AT NIGHT!” Lucina throws her hands up in exasperation. “Fine, fine. Say ‘I told you so’.”

Severa smiles smugly and plants a kiss on Lucina’s cheek. “I.” She kisses her again. “Told.”

“Ugh, save it,” Kjelle remarks. “Don’t be all gross about it.”

Severa looks up from her position in Lucina’s lap. “Hm? As if I didn’t walk in on you and Cynthia literally slobbering all over each other.”

Kjelle scowls. 

“Speaking of,” Severa looks around. “Where is she?”

Kjelle looks around. “She’s, ah…around. I think she went in to get some water.”

Lucina frowned. “I feel like she’s been gone awhile.”

Kjelle stares at her beer, watching the dull reflections of orange in the silver can. 

“Maybe she had to piss.”

Lucina smacks Severa and chastises her for being gross. 

“She said she wasn’t feeling well,” Laurent volunteers carefully. “She was just leaving as I was coming back outside.”

There’s a beat of silence, between the crackling of the fire and soft music drifting up from a CD player plugged in on the patio. 

Kjelle exhales. “Alone?”

“She did appear to be.” 

“And you just LET HER?!” Kjelle bolts upright. 

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Inigo waves it off from across the fire. “She’s a pretty girl, she can take of herself.”

Kjelle sidles between clustered chairs and discarded beer cans. “God, Laurent, I can’t believe you-”

“Kjelle,” Lucina snags her arm as she walks by. “It’ll be okay. It’s not even a mile back to the dorms.”

Kjelle bites her lip and shakes her head. “I...I’ll see you guys later, okay?” 

She slides the screen door open and stumbles through Lucina’s kitchen, past open chip bags spilled on the counter and a tray of almost-gone pizza rolls, fumbling for her bookbag. She slings it over her shoulder and stops at the door to pull her boots on, not even waiting to tie them before fumbling with the umbrella holder, groping for the hockey stick she had deposited there earlier. She slams the door behind her.

Lucina’s street is dark and quiet, a few cars parked along the sidewalk and empty otherwise. A streetlight at the corner flickers and nothing else is in motion.

“Cynth!” Kjelle calls into the night, jogging down the sidewalk. “Cynthia!” 

There’s no response. She can hear muted conversation from the glow of orange over the fence in Lucina’s backyard, and a few other houses have lights on in them, but her call falls of twilight silence.

“Cynthia!” she calls again, shifting into proper jogging form, her hockey stick in one hand. Better to keep it steady than to all-out sprint and burn her energy. “Cynthia!” 

Lucina’s street turns from cramped student housing quickly to the tree-lined boulevards that bound campus. She stops at a row of coin-operated phone booths and leans against it to catch her breath. That idiot. It isn’t a far distance, but it’s dark, and she’s alone, and - “Cynthia!” she calls out again. 

The campus parking lot is empty this time of night, streetlights casting down on empty asphalt. Even before she sees them, she can hear them.

“Agh!” a voice cries out, followed by a snarl and a scuffle. 

Kjelle moves instinctively, tightening her grip on her hockey stick and pulling a flashlight from the side pouch of her bookbag. The cone of light illuminates the far corner of the parking lot, a nook formed by the intersection of two brick walls, where the shifting shadows converge. There’s a man there - no, two men, or women - it’s unclear, but Kjelle charges regardless, swinging her hockey stick with all the force she can muster.

It cracks over one of their heads and sends the figure sprawling to the ground, opening a hole in the cluster of squirming limbs and snarling teeth.

“Cynthia!” Kjelle cries again, lashing out a leg and sending one of the figures sprawling in a spray of blood as its teeth disconnect from the bare arms of a girl huddled against the brickwork. Cynthia cries out again, blood dripping from the corner of her mouth, and holds up her arms to block an incoming blow. One of the attackers holds a length of metal pipe and it crunches painfully against Cynthia’s arm. 

“Fucker,” Kjelle spits, wielding her hockey stick like a staff and smashing the butt of it into the attacker’s face. It snarls and lunges at her, red eyes and dripping fangs reaching for any exposed flesh and meeting the resistance of her denim jacket. Kjelle snatches a fistful of its hair and darts forward, smashing its face against the brick wall in a splatter of black blood. 

As she does, one of the attackers latches onto her leg and rakes a claw across her, drawing blood and tearing her pant-leg.

She cries out and stomps down on it. 

“K-Kjelle,” Cynthia stammers, spitting blood.

“It’s okay, babe,” Kjelle slings an arm around her. “I’m here, I’m here.”

“Y-you’re hurt,” Cynthia says, watching blood bloom on Kjelle’s shoulder. Kjelle winces and uses her free arm to send and elbow crashing into the attacker’s chin. 

“I’m good. Can you walk?”

Cynthia shakes her head and leans against Kjelle heavily. 

“Right. Okay.” Kjelle releases her grip for a moment to redouble her strength with her weapon, smashing the butt into the chin of one of the attackers and dazing it. “Cynth, knife, right side!” Kjelle calls, and without hesitation Cynthia reaches into a side-pocket of Kjelle’s bookbag, withdraws a knife, and plunges it into the attacker’s forehead. It howls in pain, writhing and spurting black blood, pulling the knife from Cynthia’s grip and stumbling backwards to collapse.

“S-shit, sorry,” Cynthia murmurs into Kjelle’s shoulder. 

“It’s okay.” Kjelle slips her bookbag from her shoulders and crouches, inciting Cynthia to stagger forward and wrap her arms around her neck. 

Bookbag in one hand, hockey stick in the other, Cynthia slung over her back, Kjelle pushes herself to her feet and stumbles through the still-frenzied attackers. She breaks into a run, dragging her cargo as fast as she can away from the parking lot, past the groves of bushes and the sidewalk towards the quad, towards the dorms. 

“You okay?” she huffs. 

“Mmn,” Cynthia mumbles, dribbling blood on Kjelle’s ear. 

“Great. Great. This is great. You idiot, what did I tell you about going out without me?” 

“Sorry,” Cynthia rasps. 

Kjelle doesn’t stop moving until they’ve stumbled through the doors of the dormitory lobby, into the safety of electric light and double-plate glass doors that latch shut behind them. Even if they had pursuers, they couldn’t get through. She deposits Cynthia on one of the crappy upholstered armchairs, drops her belongings, and leans against her knees.

“That…” she breathes. “Was fucking stupid.” 

“Yeah,” Cynthia says quietly. 

Kjelle stands up, purses her lips, and nods. Cynthia looks worse in the fluorescent, blood-stained and scuffed. “Do you think you can make it up the stairs?”

Cynthia winces and shakes her head. 

“Okay. I have some supplies in my room but we might have to wait for student health to open before I can get you more, okay?”

Cynthia winces again and nods. Kjelle kisses her forehead, softly, leaving a slight red mark. She frowns and touches her own lip. Blood, and she’s not sure whose.

She carries Cynthia up to her dorm and rests her on the rumpled bedsheets, brushing aside a balled-up hockey jersey and a pile of papers. Cynthia grimaces and leans back against the pillow and headboard. “S-sorry, Kjelle.”

“It’s okay,” Kjelle says. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” She hooks a hand around the back of Cynthia’s head and holds their foreheads together, breathing. She’s hurt, true, but she’s okay. It could have been worse. It usually is. 

Kjelle pulls back. “I’m going to go get some bandages and iodine. Can you take your shirt off?”

Cynthia holds her wounded arm up limply and shakes her head. 

“I always gotta be the gentleman, huh,” Kjelle shakes her head, leaving to get supplies. 

Cynthia rests her head back against the wall and stares around Kjelle’s dorm room. It’s a mess - it always is. A wrinkly button-up shirt is draped over her desk chair, a laptop blinking on low power is pushed into the corner of the desk, papers are tacked to the wall between sticky notes and a swimsuit model calendar. Cynthia smiles and inhales. She’s spent so much time in this room it almost feels like her own.

“Okay,” Kjelle says, bunding in an armful of supplies. She drops it on the bed, bottles and plastic clattering into a pile. “First things first, I’m going to need to take a look at the damage.”

“Mm, of course, doctor,” Cynthia smiles wearily. 

“Can you be serious? Please?” Kjelle furrows her brow and reaches fumbling hands for the hem of Cynthia’s shirt. It’s a cute little blouse, utterly ruined with blood and rips. She gingerly pulls it over Cynthia’s head and deposits it into a bloody pile on the floor. “God, Cynth.”

Cynthia smiles weakly. 

She’s dotted with scrapes and gashes, blood still oozing from some of them. Her arms bore the worst of it, most likely from trying to block incoming blows. One arm is bruised and the skin is broken, blood running in hot red rivulets down to her palm, and the other is scraped and marked by a set of vicious teethmarks. There’s a rip of ragged flesh where the assailant had pulled away. 

Kjelle grimaces. She can handle blood, but seeing Cynthia like this...she steels herself and pours iodine onto a clean cloth. 

“So what happened?” she asks, scrubbing blood from Cynthia’s shoulder. 

“I…ah,” Cynthia breathes. “Ow.”

“Yeah, it’s going to burn,” Kjelle says softly. “It means it’s working.” She works her cloth downwards, brushing Cynthia’s sternum.

“I saw someone in the p-parking lot...ow ow ow shit...and...I thought he needed help…” 

Kjelle nods. Of course it was something like that. Her stupid, brave heart. 

“It seems he didn’t.” 

Cynthia laughs hoarsely. “No, he..ah. He looked hurt, and when I called out to him he reached towards me, like he might have been - OW FUCK OW!” 

“Sorry,” Kjelle says again, quietly. “This gash isn’t too deep but it’s bleeding a lot.” She wipes blood from Cynthia’s stomach and fumbles for a styptic pencil. “This is going to sting. Do you want to hold my hand?”

Cynthia whimpers and squeezes Kjelle’s hand, bracing for the pain. It burns, like it always does. The fizzling sensation on her stomach remains even as Kjelle wipes the liquid away. 

“I thought he was hurt,” Cynthia says again, quietly. 

“I know.” Kjelle finishes wiping the blood from her arms before heading to the bathroom to rinse the cloth out. 

Cynthia grasps her hand as she comes back. “I’m s-sorry I left,” she says.

“It’s okay,” Kjelle purses her lips. “I’m not mad.” She begins wrapping gauze around Cynthia’s bitten arm. The white cloth blooms small spots of red. “I’m just glad I got to you in time.”

“I d-didn’t think they’d be so close to campus.”

“You don’t need to make excuses,” Kjelle says, layering the gauze with bandages. She threads her fingers through Cynthia’s, lifting the arm. “That okay? Not too tight?”

“It’s okay.” 

“Sorry I don’t have any painkillers,” Kjelle says, setting to work on the other arm. “I can get some at student health tomorrow.” 

“It’s okay.” Cynthia leans back. “It’s really not that bad.”

“It really is, Cynth.”

Cynthia squirms in her grip, wriggling against the pain and the pressure. It burns, and they both silently hope the arm isn’t fractured. X-rays would be next to impossible, though, so Kjelle wraps it tighter. “I’m going to make a sling for you, okay? I don’t want you using this arm until it stops hurting.”

“Eugh,” Cynthia groans. “Fine, fine.” 

Kjelle shakes her head in dismay and sits on the side of the bed, wrapping her arms around Cynthia. “It’s going to be okay.”

Cynthia smiles at her, dazed and scraped. Blood still runs from a split eyebrow, and one cheek has a bad scrape, but the worst of it has been tended. She reaches out to caress Kjelle’s face. 

“You’re hurt,” she says quietly. 

“I know,” Kjelle nods, pressing her face to Cynthia’s shoulder. “I just...want to rest.”

Cynthia presses soft, salty lips to the top of Kjelle’s head. 

The adrenaline has worn off, the panic has subsided, and exhaustion sets in. Kjelle had been so focused on the basic elements of survival - getting Cynthia to safety, stopping the bleeding, tending to the worst wounds, she had barely even felt her own pain, the dull aching in her shoulder. 

She murmurs something into Cynthia’s palm when Cynthia cradles her face and wipes a stain of red from her cheek with a thumb. 

“Hm?” Cynthia asks, blinking slowly. 

“I said I’m glad your safe,” Kjelle says quietly, pressing her lips into Cynthia’s palm. She knows she probably tastes like shit, between the bloodied face and whatever happened to her shoulder, her lips tasting like stale beer and sweat and lukewarm pizza, but she kisses Cynthia and it doesn’t matter how either of them taste. Kjelle cups her chin softly and closes her eyes, pressing their foreheads together. “I’m going to go get cleaned up. You just rest, okay?” 

Cynthia nods and sinks back into the pillows and sheets, half-dressed and half-conscious, but safe and warm in Kjelle’s care. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi at @lucisevofficial on tumblr or @Cowboy_Sneep on twitter!


End file.
